Owner peed in customers bushes 1 star review (Live Q & A)

On Instagram, live on YouTube, and yes, the owner peed in a customer's bushes and they got a one-star review. I start off these lives with what's going on, crazy things going on in the marketplace, ChatGPT, AI search, and just crazy things that come up inside of my business helping home service businesses. And this one is true: the owner peed in customer bushes and they left a one-star review. And we asked the owner, hey man, what happened here? And he's like, oh, let me figure this out. And his brother was on a job site and peed. It says customer bushes, but I'm sure, you know, it's an arborist company. He probably went out into the trees and, and had to relieve himself. And he's like, well, how do we respond? I'm like, this is a bigger question. I'm bringing it up today in our live Q&A. We're going to be going through some questions from home service business owners. If you're watching this and you have questions about AI search, growing home service businesses, marketing, sales, any of that stuff, Drop a comment as you hop in here. But we're going to be talking about, first off, if you get a crazy review like this and it's true, how do you actually respond? And we're going to talk about why responding to reviews is so important. All right. So at my home service business, we had technicians that would literally pee in people's walkways, like in apartment buildings, in the stairwells. I'm like, dude, you can't be peeing in stuff because we're going to get bad reviews for this. They had them on camera even. So how do you respond to reviews? that come in, especially 1-stars. So let's talk about this. The first thing that's most important is that if you get a 1-star review, you have to make sure you respond to it. Because right now, people, when they're doing a search for home service businesses or even local service businesses in general, they go there and they read the 1-star reviews because they want to see if this goes south, what is the business going to respond to and how are they going to interact? Are they going to blow people up? We— I work with so many home service businesses and it's— it runs the gamut. Sometimes people are like, I looked up this person, where they live. I know where they work. I know their Facebook account. Like, we need to blow them up online. All the way to like, don't respond. Let the lying dogs lie or whatever. It's like, just leave them alone and don't say anything back to these 1-stars. So what should you do? Here's my take on it. You should respond to the 1-star reviews because people are looking these things up. And if they're looking at 1-star reviews in their evaluation of your business, then you want to make sure you have a professional response that goes up. So I'm not saying just deny, deny, deny. But what I am saying is like, hey, thanks so much for bringing this up to us. This is pretty concerning that you might have seen this or interacted with our business in this way. Could you please give us a call? Because we take claims like this very, very seriously and we want to get your side of the story or we're going to hear exactly what happened. That way we can figure out how we're going to address this going forward. It allows you to not say outright, yeah, we did this. My bad. And also allows them a place to contact you. Now, a couple of things come up when you respond. Number one, they can't respond back to your review. So you post a response on Google, you post a response on Yelp, whatever. There's no back and forth responses. So you get one shot at a response. They get one shot at a review. The second thing is when you respond to that review, they actually get notified that you responded. So they're going to get an email to their Gmail that says you got a response to your review. So you really get one shot to address whatever they did and have them come back in. So, you know, as you're hopping in here, if you have any crazy 1-star review stories, drop them in the comments, or if you're watching this after the fact, drop them in the comments as well. That was a really crazy one. Another crazy 1-star review that happened to me at my home service business was one of our technicians actually walked in to a woman who had just got out of the shower because we were doing duct cleaning and the husband let us in, but he didn't tell his wife. And we do duct cleaning. And so the husband was very mad and it's like, bro, you got to let everyone know that there's people in your home doing work. And he was mad with us on that. Um, and, and I mean, rightfully so, but you got to let everyone know. So moral of the story, number one, your team technicians, sometimes even the owner in, in the case that I just mentioned, are going to do crazy things and things are going to happen. People are going to get upset. People are going to drive, you know, cut people off, all those things. And it happens. Number 2 is you got to make sure that you respond to the reviews in a professional manner. One thing I didn't mention was you can report reviews to be taken down. So a very popular one on Google is like, hey, you cut me off. Your truck cut me off. You guys are terrible drivers. You can report that one. And 9 times out of 10, it's going to get removed because it's not a real customer experience. It's just a driving experience. And he said, she said. So you can report the reviews. And I would recommend trying to report reviews. if you feel like it's not true or not fair. Um, cool. Let's hop into our Q&A. I'm live on IG and YouTube. If you got a question that you want to drop in, drop it down in the chat, the comments. Uh, these are pulled from videos, content, stuff people say, and my team puts it together for me. So let me hop to the first one here. There's a 20-minute delay between when a lead comes in and when my team sees it. In a world where speed to lead matters, am I losing deals in this gap? And this is a remodeling company. So yes, 20-minute delay between when a lead comes in and when my team sees it. Yes, because just because they saw it doesn't mean that they reach out to the business. And even if they do reach out to the business, 20 minutes is a long time. So at my home service business, this was the exact same situation. People would fill out a form online. We would wait for the customer service representatives to see it. And then they would call that business, that person and say like, hey, you know, you just filled out this form, get some information. I would say about 6 out of 10 times, 60% of the time, they wouldn't answer the phone. And then poof, the lead's gone. So how do you fix this is you got to do 3 things. Number 1, when someone fills out a form, you got to text them right away and ask them a question because people are in the mode right now of getting this problem solved. So if you can take it to the next level, which is submit a form, ask them a question, now you can start the conversation with them and ask them for a picture is usually the best one. Number 2, send them an email. Some people like emails, they're not texters, like leave me alone. That's cool. Send them an email. And then number 3 is call them when you can and make sure that you put them, if they don't answer, into what we call a lead nurture sequence. So essentially you send them a text, hopefully they respond. You send them an email, hopefully they respond. You call them, hopefully they answer. But if those 3 things don't happen, they need to go into what we call a lead nurture sequence. This is over 14 days, a text and email sequence that happens to nurture those leads. And it's like, hey, are you still looking to get this project done? You know, hey, what's going on with your gutters? Is it a leaky thing? Is it overflowing? You know, whatever, like asking them probing questions to get the conversation going again. Because some people, they just fill out forms at night and then they go to sleep and then wake up in the morning and they don't even think about it ever again. And then a week later it rains and they're like, okay, I need to get this problem solved again. And so this is why you need to stay top of mind. So the way you cut down on the 20-minute gap, text, email, lead nurture sequence, make sure that you're calling. The big problem here is that if you just rely on humans, CSRs, then you're not doing everything that you could be doing to make sure that you close all the leads. Because one of the quickest ways that we found to grow business is not just like pay more money to get leads, but actually turn the leads that we have into jobs. And that's why cutting down on the 20-minute time is so important. All right, next question we got here is, I'm spending $10,000 a month on Google Ads and my agency sends me a report full of clicks and impressions, but I still have no idea if my actual— if I'm actually making money. How do I get real return on ad spend visibility? And this is a remodeling company. All right. Great question here. It's probably the question that every business asks if they're spending money on ads is, is this working? So at my home service business, the way that it worked was we would spend like, you know, $3,000 on a new channel. And then in 3 months, the owner would be like, gut feeling, my revenue's up. So this must be working, or my revenue's down. So that Yelp platform sucks. You know, And it's like, okay, we can't evaluate if ad spend is making us money or not just off gut feeling. And we can't do that based off of revenue going up or down. We actually have to track it. So in this example, you're spending $10,000. You said that they're sending you a report full of clicks and impressions. The next step that I would ask for, and this is what we did, was I said, okay, I appreciate that, but I care about leads. But more importantly, I care about revenue. So if we talk about leads, who are all these leads that you got? And if you can get a spreadsheet with all the calls and leads, that would be very helpful. So try to get a spreadsheet of all the calls and leads that you got. That way on a monthly basis, you can say, okay, I got all these leads and all these calls. Then we used to do this manually, but now we have, you know, an agent and all this stuff that does this. But you take all those leads and then you go to your CRM and you line them up line by line. The phone number from this lead, go to your CRM and see what happened. Did you quote it? Did you do an estimate? Did you convert it? Where's it at? And then every single, like, if they have a phone number or an email and you line it up, and then you'll get a return on ad spend. And the numbers that you want for this is ad spend. So I spent $2,000. Lead count, I got 10 leads. So my cost per lead is $200 a lead. Then how many estimates did I actually do? Like, how many opportunities did I get? Because just because you got 10 leads doesn't mean that they're all good leads. Right? You need to know that they actually turn into estimates, which means that they're probably better leads. So let's say you turn 10 of those— let's say that you got 3 of those into estimates. Then how much money did you actually quote? This is very important because if you did 3 estimates and let's say those estimates totaled $9,000, well, you spent $2,000 and now you quoted $9,000. So potentially, if you could close those, then you'd be at a 4 or 5x return on ad spend, which is not bad. Because then if you didn't close any of them, let's say you got $0 in return on ad spend, but you quoted $9,000. This usually means that there's a sales problem. It's not necessarily a marketing problem or a leads problem. It's more down funnel. It's in the sales process. So if you are spending $10,000 like this person and your agency is just sending you impressions and clicks, number one, ask them, can you start sending me leads? Like the actual people, the phone numbers and emails. What would be really nice is if you could go into my CRM and do the return on ad spend reporting for me, so that way you can make decisions on your campaigns. I mean, who would have thought? This is exactly like how I felt. That's why when I built my company, I'm like, we have to do this because if we're trying to market people, then we should know the full picture and we should be confident in saying, yes, spend more here, spend less here. Let's do this. Let's do that. And you can only feel confident if you know that it's actually making a business money. And most agencies, in my opinion, If they don't know the full picture, they may have misaligned incentives of trying to get you to spend money on marketing or ads just because it gives them more commission opposed to actually helping you grow your business, especially if they don't know all the data. So don't get me started on that one because that's a big hot button for me. Um, so work with the company that gets you return on ad spend, or at least gets you the leads, and then you can do it from there. Um, all right, let's see. Number 3, I brought up budget changes with my marketing team a month ago And nothing happened until the next meeting. How fast should I expect my agency to act when I ask for a change? Okay, good, good question here. So, so this is specifically when you ask your agency to make a change, how fast should they do it? Now, your question is about budget changes, and I would imagine that has to do with running ads. So a couple things here. Just because you think, oh my gosh, I want to spend more money on ads, does not mean that you should. This is a very important part of having a partner and not just someone who's going to just take your money and just like go pray to the Google gods that helps you grow. Because sometimes business owners, they feel like, hey, I got money and I want leads, so let me go here and pour more money on it when that might not be the best use of that money on that ad platform. So I think the first question is, do you have a partner here or is it just like, hey, I told— I'm telling them what to do? Because if you're the marketing manager and you're telling your marketing company what to do, Then it might not be the best fit in my opinion, because you might be the one that's pushing the charge instead of them telling you what to do and using them as a strategist, like who not how type of thing. But the greater question here is how long should it take them to make updates? So this was another hot button that I had, which was I used to email my marketing company when I was at my home service business, and I'd be like, hey guys, can you make an update here? And it would be 7 days till I hear back from them, and I'd have to email support at email, and then You know, they'd send me an email back and then I go back and forth with them. It was very frustrating for me. What I would say is that the standard from a marketing company perspective is around 3 to 5 days response times. And then from a deliverables perspective, like I want this done and this should happen, is 7 days. Now, what I will tell you is that if you are working with a company and it's longer than that and you're emailing a support@ email, then you could get very frustrated because this is how I felt. So ideally you should work with a person or a company that gives you a person that's a call, text, or email away so that way you can work with them one-on-one and interact with them. So that would be my 2 cents on that is like try to find a blend of it. But how fast should I expect my agency to act when I ask for a change? It depends. They should get back to you in 24 hours with a response. If you want to change to something, it should be like 5 to 7 days. That's a good benchmark here. Cool. What's up guys that are on IG? I'm live. Feel free to drop a question if you have anything. And then on YouTube, I'm live guys, so feel free to hop in the chat, drop a comment or question. Let's see. Next question. My best salespeople have incredible product knowledge, but none of it is on my website. How do I get what's in their heads into content that actually ranks? And this is a kitchen remodeling company. All right, really good question here. If you followed any of my content, I talk a lot about like AI search. And the shift from non-commodity content to unique, specific content. And this is what Google wants for SEO. And so in your specific instance, you have all of these people, salespeople that have great product knowledge, but it's never, it's nowhere to be found online. So there's 2 things. Number one, you should create content and have them say all this really smart stuff. So for example, you could do, take out your phone, record them and ask them questions and just let them talk. And then take that content and use it as videos and add it to your social content, social profiles. This is a great way to just get the stories out of their head. The other one, which I talk about a lot, is you should be recording their calls. So they, they have sales calls, they have interactions with customers, they answer, you know, customer questions. Is use that information from those calls inside of your content. Use it to build content from the actual expertise that they have. This will allow you to build a company brain and a documentation and also get the information off the sales calls, out of their brains, into content format, blogs, social media posts, videos, short form, long form. All those things are important in the age of AI search because it's essentially, we need to train these platforms as that we are the authority. I was on a podcast yesterday and this exactly came up. The person was looking for a speaker in Tennessee and He went to, he was using Perplexity, but whatever you want, Claude, ChatGPT. And he asked the platform, hey, I need a speaker on AI that lives in Tennessee. And it went through and gave some recommendations on people that it would recommend. Now, how would it know that? Because before it would, you would go to Google and you type it in and someone would have a website and a blog, let's say, or a section on their website with a title tag that said AI, expert in Tennessee and then to have a website with it. And we trusted that Google would show the number 1 ranked person as a number 1 ranked person, and we should try to rank on Google. Now it's not about that. It's about training these platforms that we're the expert. And the only way that we do that is by creating content that shows us that we're the expert and that they trust us. It's a complete shift from just doing SEO and keywords and title tags and meta description to actually creating content that shows us as the expert. Cool, guys. I got a short one for you. You can probably hear I'm a little sick, so never fun, but I'm live. If you got a question on IG, you could drop it in the comments, and YouTube, you could drop it on the comments after the fact. Another really cool thing, my book actually just came out, and it's called The Second Engine. So you go to Amazon, you can get The Second Engine and put Phil Risher in, and you'll be able to get it there. Pretty pumped for that. Really exciting times for us. Um, next week, in a week and a half, I'm going out to Austin, Texas. Actually, I'm speaking at, uh, Jobber Now and to their Jobber Retreat stuff. Um, there's about like 600 business owners that I'm going to be speaking with about AI search and content. So I'm going to be documenting that whole process. I'll probably have a video for that. So pretty cool. But yeah, guys, appreciate you hanging out with me. If you got questions after the fact, drop them in the comments. We'll get them to next Thursday.